Archive for video game

Dead Nation is an addictive and gruesome twin stick zombie shooter from the developers of Super Stardust HD. During the past couple of years several zombie shooters have been released, and have oversaturated the market depending on your tastes. Does Dead Nation have what it takes to stand up on its own? Or is it an infectious scourge on the PlayStation Store? Hit the break for my verdict.

Dead Nation will definitely be one of the most addictive and well-polished PSN titles you will play all year. Dead Nation occurs in a deserted city where everyone has been turned into flesh eating zombies. The main character, the only survivor, miraculously remains immune to the virus that has infected everyone in the planet. The story which focuses on your desire to survive is both cliché and well presented. Dead Nation features rough, yet beautifully drawn cut-scenes that are used to progress the story. Combine that with great voice acting and you have a story that is more intriguing than it should be.

Anyone that has played Geometry Wars and Super Stardust will be able to step right into Dead Nation. The right stick controls aiming and the left stick controls the player movement. Any player can step right in and start blowing chunks out of the infected. Dead Nation features a number of best looking dismemberment by any arcade game. Zombies are very eager to taste your flesh and a few require quick moves in order to be dealt with. Dead Nation has an amazing amount of enemy variety, which is essential to making a deep experience. Players can expect slow and burdensome enemy types all the way to extremely fast and frisky enemies. In fact, Dead Nation does a very good job of including every type of enemy you can think of.

Dead Nation is an exceedingly moody game, and features some of the best graphics and lighting in an arcade title. Despite the deep atmosphere, Dead Nation also brings about frequent breaks of humour, which helps the game from having an overwhelming amount of depressing tone. If all the previously mentioned elements weren’t enough, Dead Nation is also cleverly paced. Enemies, appear, hide and swarm you in the most inconvenient moments, helping to keep you engaged at all times. So many instances that developers have failed in one area or another, still even the sound design is outstanding. The ambient noise that plays in the background, combined with the sound effect, enemy chatter and music helps create another layer of fascination that is lacking from some retail titles.

Dead Nation features both offline and online 2-player co-op play. It was hard to assess if there were any latency problems since only a few people were online playing. Perhaps my favourite feature is the way Dead Nation handle their leaderboards. Not only does it do an impressive job of tracking stats, but it also counts your country’s stats. The more zombies you neutralize, the quicker you can help clear the infection from your country. This leaderboard does not only facilitate competition between players, but it also encourages competition between countries. It creates a unique sense of competition that I haven’t experienced within an arcade game in quite some time.

I highly recommend Dead Nation. I would encourage you to purchase it as soon as it gets released on November 30th. It’s an impressively polished, very addictive, and highly atmospheric game that no one should miss out on.

Activision has just released their vehicle-combat game Blood Drive on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. What is Blood Drive you might ask? Well, to begin with it is not Activision going around asking people to donate their blood for local blood banks. No, we’ll save those blood drives for people like the Red Cross. This Blood Drive is all about armoured cars and zombies.

In this game, players control the cars and battle each other and the hordes of zombies as they compete in a televised game show.

According to David Pokress of Activision Publishing, “Zombies and over-the-top vehicular combat are two things that go great together.” And it is kind of difficult to find fault in his statement.

Love for the Undead

I mean zombies still remain to be very popular. Adding zombies to things continues to rack up sales and interest no matter how many times it has been done. But this was not always the case. Some may remember Carmageddon — pretty great game for its time, lots of fun. But then along came Carmageddon 64, replacing the pedestrians you could run down from regular people to zombies. And man did gamers dislike the change. But now we love zombies, be they communist or nazi.

Blood Drive features 6 different environments, and multiplayer allowing up to 4 players to drop-in and drop-out as they wish. While zombies might be very popular now there was a time when vehicular combat games ruled the gaming world. Now with growing interest in the vehicular combat genre – with games like the upcoming Twisted Metal perhaps leading the charge – this might just be the perfect time for Activision to cash in on two fads at once.

Blood Drive was released on November 2, 2010 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Kratos could possibly be the angriest video game character ever created. We know for a fact that he accidentally killed his wife and child in service to the gods, but his contentious attitude has often made me wonder what else might have happened to him that made him so filled with rage. We get some comprehension into this in God of War: Ghost of Sparta, which makes a wonderful job adding depth to Kratos’ character while delivering one of the most entertaining and beautiful gameplay experiences on the PSP. Ghost of Sparta is, undoubtedly, one of the best games available for the PSP.

The Plot

Ghost of Sparta begins just right after the end of God of War, with Kratos sitting upon his newly claimed throne looking disgruntled. After all, becoming a god did not remove the disturbing memories of his past, but now he’s being troubled by a vision we’ve never seen before — an old woman lying sick on a slab of stone. Convinced that he can actually change this vision, Kratos goes to Atlantis on a quest that eventually takes him back Sparta and into the realm of Thanatos, god of death.

Graphics

Ghost of Sparta is as gorgeous as it gets. Graphically, it looks better than a lot of PS2 games, and is definitely the best-looking game on the PSP thus far. Detailed environments featuring unrelenting rain and cascading water and lava create beautiful sceneries and really bring the world to life. Kratos looks great as well. In fact, his character model was redesigned from the ground up to add more detail for this game.

Gameplay

As for the gameplay, there’s nothing really unique here, but that is not a bad thing. You’ll still spend most of your time slaying countless enemies, traversing treacherous domains, and solving light puzzles. Combat has been perfected throughout the series, so there’s little to improve upon. That said, there are two new magical attacks and a brand new weapon that add something new to the experience.

Closing Comments

Unbelievably, the developers at Ready at Dawn managed to exceed what they did with Chains of Olympus, delivering a deeper, longer and more graphically beautiful game than even they thought was originally possible. Just when I thought I knew everything about Kratos, I’ve been given insight into another piece of his past that makes his rage much more understandable. The path less travelled as far as characters and locations makes Ghost of Sparta a very important chapter in Kratos’ story. Slicing troublesome minions in a variety of stunning locations is an exhilarating experience, and because the adventure lasts for more than 10 hours, you can lose yourself in this extraordinary land for quite a while. Ghost of Sparta is a gorgeous and delightful adventure that will keep you glued to the screen until the very end.

Saw II: Flesh & Blood is a third person survival horror video game that is sequel to 2009’s Saw: The Video Game, both of which are based on the popular Saw films. Saw II picks up just after Saw and is set between the second and third movie. If you’re a big fan of the Saw series, chances are you’ll enjoy this sequel. Make sure you grab a copy just after you read my review!

Plot

Flesh & Blood is set between the second and third movie in the series. The new lead character, Michael, is the son of Detective David Tapp, who begins to investigate the cause of his father’s death which eventually makes him a target of the Jigsaw Killer and his apprentice Pighead. The game will supposedly take the player to a number of locations including factories, hotels, sewers, and other places to capture Jigsaw and find clues behind the detective’s death.

Gameplay

Saw II retains the same style of gameplay as the first game, being basically a third-person survival horror game with very intense action elements. Puzzles from the original game return, such as the “circuit puzzles”; but instead of matching them with the same colour, the player needs to match wires of opposite colour (yellow to red and vice-versa). Lockpicking also returns, but uses a new mini game that gets the player to manipulate the tumblers to unlock. Also, environmental puzzles are presented in a new way, like having to turn the flashlight on-and-off in certain areas to reveal certain clues. Quick-time traps are back; in addition to shotguns being hidden behind doors new lethal traps have been introduced such as closing walls, swinging scythes, and loose floorboards. They are placed throughout certain areas for the player to avoid by pressing a button in a timely fashion.

For this sequel, the entire combat system was revamped from the original game. There are two types of combat: puzzle-based and melee. Puzzle-based combat encourages the player to make use of traps or the environment to kill enemies, like opening an elevator shaft as the enemy charges into it to eliminate them. Melee combat, on the other hand, consists of the player using their hands and feet or weapons to neutralize an enemy. Quick maneuvers and defensive repercussion to defend the player from aggressive enemies is the basis of the combat. Timing is also very essential in fighting and neutralizing enemies.

The “Case Files” from the first game also return. The files’ subjects are varied but a few focus on Detective Tapp’s testimonies on his raid of Jigsaw’s hideout and his entrapment in Whitehurst Asylum. Also, Billy the Puppet dolls are a new collectible which can be found scattered in different locations in the game. There are several areas in the game where you have to solve more difficult puzzles to obtain the dolls. Multiple endings are back, only this time around players should complete the game again completely to unlock a different ending due to the decisions made throughout the game that affect the final outcome of the game.